Yep. The US and other Western (and Eastern, like Russia and Turkey) powers keep using ethnic/religious minorities in the Middle East for their own purposes and then tossing them to the wolves.

It's also extremely suspicious than ISIS just gave Jarabulus to the Turks when the Kurds went through over 2 months of intense fighting to get Manbij.

Btw, the Kurds and the Syrian regime have a sort of love/hate relationship. Their are some areas under their joint control like Hasaka and Qamishli towns and they have been fighting there sometimes. But the regime has also been arming them against ISIS. They are united in their secularism and dislike of fundamentalist islamists and neither of them is happy with the Turkish invasion.

This was from a newsletter from a spice import company, Penzey's Spices.

Quote:

Thanks so much for your overwhelmingly positive responses to our call for cooks to be a part of our Countdown to Thanksgiving400™ Catalog. A big part of our excitement for Thanksgiving400 is that it makes obvious that America is where it is today because of our tradition, set in motion over the summer of 1621 by the kindness of the Wampanoag people, of not just letting outsiders in, but of working to help newcomers succeed. It's pretty much why all of us are here, and without it there's no way we could have achieved our position of leadership in the world. Of course not all the responses to this message were positive. I read all responses, positive and negative, and I apologize for not having time to answer each one individually.

To those negative responses, what I can say is that yes, you can get opinions from Fox News and AM radio etc, but we can't get Spices from them. To do what we do, on the level we do it, we have to travel out into the real world and face it for the realities it holds. What you are watching and listening to are programs crafted to make you think the way they want you to think. Our job brings us face-to-face with reality, and our experience with the reality of the world has taught us that human goodness, and human kindness, have nothing to do with skin tone, orientation, or brand of religion. We know this. This is our experience. And we will continue to share it.

I am truly sorry if you can't continue to purchase spices from us because we share an experience at odds with the world view your programs encourage you to hold. For what it's worth, there's nothing we've found traveling the world that you can't also find in your own kitchen if you are willing to look. The lesson of cooking is when you care about people, and respect them for who they are, better futures get set in motion. Cooking really is the exact opposite of discrimination. One of the things I really like about Thanksgiving400 is that it takes place in 2021, after this election and the next one, at a point where our progressing demographics will have left us in a better place. Here's to more united times. Please know we will always be excited for your return.

I unsubscribed from their newsletter in a Great Email Purge a while back, but look at this from their MLK Day letter last year.

Quote:

As much as we don't like to dwell on it too much, for many, the American experience has come with an unhealthy dose of inequality. How do people face injustice without just giving up or letting their anger get the best of them? From our time with the Motleys I think the answer to that question is love. If you have enough love in your life, you have a chance to continue on where others fade away and maybe even hold on long enough to play a part in change. The Motleys' love so clearly flows through their lives and their recipes.

And send your love to today's protesters. They need a bunch of it if they are to be successful—and it would be so good for all of us if they were successful.

In recent years we seem to have developed a romanticized version of Martin Luther King's life, one where he came and had tea with elected officials who then gave his nobility a standing ovation and spontaneously removed all laws of discrimination from the books and sent him on his way with a little box of cookies. It did not happen that way.

Sadly, then as now, anyone working to advance equality all too often comes face to face with the very worst in human nature. For MLK Jr. Day 2015, if you get a chance, please read Dr. King's letter from Birmingham Jail. The letter is long, but it gives great insight to both his time and to why his life so very much deserves celebration.

And if you know anyone continuing his legacy by taking the protest against today's inequality to the streets, baking them a box of cookies really couldn't hurt.

Share your love and have a great weekend,
Bill

I just really, really like that company. And I am out of a few things.

I'm pretty sure it's also illegal, at least in practical terms, to not change your baby's diaper. So for all intents and purposes, it's illegal to have a baby in Arizona now. And yet somehow it's illegal not to have a baby as well.

But I'm sure that, as long as you aren't doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about. The vagueness is necessary to make sure all the bad guys get caught.

Sadly though, these same walls will, and do, stop wildlife in their tracks, denying them the territory, resources and genetic exchange they need in order to survive and adapt in the arid environment of the borderlands.

I've an aversion to making new threads, (You can probably tell by the way I spam the shit out of this one.) and this might actually merit one. So if someone has an editorial they want to share on this, really, no butthurt here if they want to make a new thread.

Nimble America says it’s dedicated to proving that “shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real,” according to the company’s introductory statement, and has taken credit for a billboard its founders say was posted outside of Pittsburgh with a cartoonishly large image of Clinton’s face alongside the words “Too Big to Jail.”